


Brittle Bones

by orphan_account



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, I wanted to write a story where Shepard told Joker about Hilary. It didn't work out.</p><p>This work took its place.</p><p>Mother. Father. Lover. Commander. Sister. A few separate short stories centred around Joker, each set against a backdrop of loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. -MOTHER-

Lucy Moreau had eleven months left to live when she called her son to tell him she'd retired and the family was relocating to Tiptree. She shared with him her aspirations to take up knitting and told him she was planning a five-system tour of the galaxy. After he gave his own suggestions on what she should see, she said that he'd have to visit them once they'd settled into routine, and then she bid him goodbye. With love, of course. 

It hadn't been her intention to conceal her condition from her son, but it was nevertheless the outcome. Try as she might, she couldn't communicate even the simplest details of the cancer that had bloomed throughout her body, first one tumour, and then so many more that she asked her doctor to stop telling her how thoroughly disease had sprouted from the seeds of her cells and planted itself in her rich, healthy organs.

“ _She didn't want you to feel pressured to come home_ ,” Joker's father said later, when he asked him why nobody told him the truth. “ _Besides, it was just cancer. That's got, what, less than a 5% mortality rate these days? We figured she'd beat it just fine, Jeff_.”

She had been beautiful once, his mother. Calm and strong and reliable, and so full of life that it was unfathomable she could be so thoroughly drained of it. But like her son before her, she was destined to become a statistic, one of the one-in-a-million people whose bodies simply, unfairly, refused to be healthy.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Rain had been pouring down as the day had dawned, but the skies were clear by mid-afternoon which left the air around the Moreau's farm fresh and cool, the ground moist in the way that Hilary loved best for the feel of soft mud sloshing between the softer skin of her toes.

Joker was sitting in the dining room when the sun first struggled to permeate the clouds, and he was still there hours later to witness Hilary flow into the room like a shadow, dark curls bouncing against the back of an even darker dress with white lace accents, their loops and whirls shaped like daisies. He watched her pull herself up onto the high windowsill where she sat perched with her side pressed against the glass and her legs left dangling. Little lace socks poked out above too-tight black shoes that she'd only worn twice before; once when their grandfather died, and again when their grandmother followed him seven months later. It had been a struggle for their father to fit her feet back into them, but he had succeeded, and so she stayed indoors. 

“Hey there, squirt,” he called out to her. “You doin' okay?” 

“Yeah,” she said, and then, “No,” and finally, “Have you ever killed anyone?” 

Her voice, ordinarily, was hard and brisk as if she was projecting thirty more years onto her six years of life, but there was nothing but innocence in her delivery then. Joker pushed his chair away from the table, its wooden legs scraping sharp against the floor. Hilary looked at him, something scolding in her eyes that he couldn't place.

“Okay,” he said, unable to work around the tightness in his voice, “Who taught you to just dive right in and ask the uncomfortable questions first?”

“Nobody,” she said. “I think I teached myself.” 

Joker laughed, more of an awkward hitch of his voice than the soothing note with which he'd hoped to balm the conversation. “You sure you don't want to start us off with another question? Like maybe, I don't know, hey, how are you?”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “I don't got any others. And I know how you are. You're sad, like daddy.” 

Through his expansive experience as a recipient of bad diagnoses, Joker had learned how to downplay the pain that stemmed from simple deliveries of uncomfortable facts, at least until the time was better for dealing with them. But Hilary's words stirred up something new in him. Guilt, maybe, or regret. Or neither. Mortality was a distant concept to him when he was her age, and he couldn't fathom how it felt for her to be such a young veteran of grief, having to bear her scars in a display of empathy beyond her years. 

The thought was, in understatement, unpleasant, so he quieted it; watched her watch him instead, her eyes expectant, her faith that he'd answer her so absolute she didn't even consider pressing her question. It made it impossible for him to evade her, to deny her an answer. 

Sometimes, he'd learned, the pilot just had to pull the ship's trigger. 

And sometimes, he knew, the big brother had no business dealing in honesty. 

“Not a soul, squirt,” he lied. “I'm just the guy who drives everyone else around.”

Hilary perked up a little, just enough to calm the guilt that was making Joker queasy. “Like a taxi shuttle?” 

“Oh, come on! You think I spent all those years training just to fly around in a box? Way, way bigger than a taxi shuttle.”

“Okay,” Hilary said. “I'm glad.”

“How come?” 

“It means you didn't take away anybody's mommy,” she answered. Then, deciding that she'd had enough of talking, she turned away from Joker to give her full attention to the green grass and green crops and green life outside. 

“Hilary,” Joker called out to her. When she didn't answer, he stretched out her name, first _Hi-la-reeeeee_ , then _Hil-a-il-a-ilary_. 

But she didn't look back in spite of her sadness, not wanting to lose the veneer of togetherness that she'd built up as a defense against being small and young and frightened by the finalities of death. Even so, she couldn't keep the fine line of her shoulders from fluttering as unbidden weaknesses struggled to the surface. 

“Hey,” Joker tried again, “You know what I could use right about now?”

Hilary shook her head so lightly that the gesture almost went without notice. 

“A big hug, the biggest you can give me. What do you say?”

Tentatively, unsure, she slid down from the windowsill. Her face was dry, Joker noticed, the skin framing her eyes still more peach than red. He couldn't decide whether he admired her composure or found it heartbreaking. “It's okay?” she asked. “I'm not going to break you?”

Heartbreaking won. “Not a chance.” 

Without further questioning, Hilary made her way to her brother, who'd already opened his arms for her. She climbed into them with a slowness that gave away her fear of shattering his bones, then wrapped her arms around his neck, burying her face in the collar of his Alliance dress uniform. 

“I broke mommy,” she said, and then she couldn't say anything else behind the force of her tears. 

“Hil...,” Joker said, speaking softly into her hair. She shook her head and Joker took it as a sign to let her be, at least for now. Even if he could put together the right words to soothe her, he worried that his dwindling composure would betray the falsehood of his own steadiness, and he knew that Hilary needed him to be strong and solid so she could feel at least a little more confident that he wouldn't break, too. 

Days earlier, before his mother succumbed to disease, he had reflected on how far removed he was from the helplessness of his childhood now that he knew the freedom of flight. But that confidence seemed ludicrous in the imposing presence of his sister's grief, beneath which he felt reduced to something not unlike the small boy he used to be, held up by painful metal braces, watching Dreadnoughts and Cruisers and Fighters glide gracefully between the stars, hoping beyond the depths of his dreams that he would one day be in control of his own ship. Only this time he was pained by a little girl who lost a lost a large part of herself when her mother died, and no matter how thoroughly he wanted to lift her high above her circumstances so that all she knew were the stars and the limitless potential between them he didn't have enough time or energy to dream, or to hope, or to work towards offering her something greater than acceptance. 

For now, silence was all he had to give. 

“I thought,” she said minutes later, her words choked out between tears, “I thought you were mad at me. And that's why... that's why you didn't come to see me right away.”

“That's not true.”

“Didn't daddy tell you?”

“Nothing about you, squirt.” 

Hilary pulled back away from Joker, just far enough so she could look him in the face. The attempt contorted her body in a way that had to be uncomfortable, he thought, but she seemed to relax beneath the fondness in his eyes so he let her be. 

“They told me I shouldn't go see her, but... I couldn't sleep,” she eventually said. “So I sneaked in after daddy went to bed and the nurse went home. Mommy didn't mind and she held me real close but... but... she didn't wake up when I did and then daddy came in, and he made me leave, and when he came back out he told me, he told me she was gone.”

How she managed to confess all that without as much as a crack in her voice, Joker wasn't sure. He didn't know how she kept herself from crying again either, but there she was, with strength and stubbornness hardening the apples of her cheeks. 

“Hey, she might have died alone if it wasn't for you,” he said, softly. “You did good.” 

She curled back into his arms, pressing her head into the crook of his shoulder, breathing warm air down his collar. “I still think I did it,” she said, and Joker didn't have the heart to argue. She had done something she wasn't supposed to do and in the course of that action, her mother had died. As disconnected as the two events were, they were inextricably linked by a child's logic, and he wasn't going to be able to help her see otherwise, not yet. 

So he drew Hilary closer to him, uncomfortably aware that she was only days removed from lying in the arms of her mother's corpse, and held her as tight as he could without shattering them both. They remained like that, each sibling calmed by their connection with the other, for more time than either of them knew, until their father came downstairs and said, numbly, “It's time to go.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

It was five years before Joker amassed enough money and paid vacation time to rent a small shuttle capable of mass effect travel, and it took another eight months for him and Hilary to plot a course that covered five systems, seventeen planets, and six colonies.

On the final day of their solo journey they stood together at the edge of a waterfall, watching as its clean blue current undulated down into a pool bordered by immense white rocks, pink quartz and green, fern-like leaves abloom with golden flowers. 

“Careful, squirt,” Joker said as Hilary took another step toward the edge. 

“I know,” she said. She was trembling; Joker could hear it in her voice. But he could feel her strength there too, her confidence, her reverence. 

And her peacefulness; at last, her peacefulness. 

While Joker placed a white stone urn down in a patch of purple, pink, and blue flowers spherically full of petals, she extended her clenched hand over the waterfall. “Okay, now.”

Joker rose and limped as close as her as he could manage without placing himself in danger of stumbling over the edge, which wasn't as near to her as he'd have liked. “I'm ready whenever you are.”

She opened her hand and from it billowed a small puff of ash, the last tangible remnants of their mother. They stood there for a while, pretending that they could see it fall. Then Hilary turned to him and asked, “Do you think she knows what we've done for her? Do you think she's happy?”

Joker didn't look at her. He didn't know much about faith or religion, and he hadn't given thought to any sort of afterlife, but he spent the entire trip hoping that she was watching them from the stars. 

He told Hilary precisely that.


	2. - FATHER -

In old photos, Kevin Moreau stood strong and lean.

Some of them were from a time when he was still lanky from growth spurts, and the muscles he showed off were uneven, built from eagerness rather than experience. He had a similarly lopsided smile and an underlying air of mischief lifted his face. Teenage Kevin was almost always included in a group of people Joker didn't recognize, participating in things like football and rink hockey, snowboarding and rafting, camping and fishing; anything, it seemed, that would take him outdoors. 

More often, the photos showed him as an adult on Tiptree, where he had worked odd jobs as a fisherman, a farmhand, and a general labourer. Through the repetitiveness of his responsibilities he had serendipitously developed the even tone of someone who knew discipline, though he still looked every bit as impish as in his earlier years. 

In Joker's memories, though, he was soft. The fine lines of his body had been smoothed away and his life was etched into his face instead, deep laugh lines folding around his mouth and deeper wrinkles creasing his forehead. Gone was the verdancy and blueness that once served as his background; instead, he blended in with the dominant grayness of Arcturus Station. 

Growing up, Joker struggled to reconcile the differences between the father he knew and the one who had never known him. Having been forced into a sedentary lifestyle himself, he couldn't relate to the thought that anyone could feel fulfilled by a shift from a life of great activity to one of relatively little. It became a problem for him to solve, and whenever his parents were away from home he would sit holed up in their bedroom, piecing through the mementos of their past, rewriting their story towards a conclusion he could comprehend. 

Once, during a downswing brought on by too many doctors telling him too few positive things, he overheard his father asking his mother, _why do we have to have this problem with our son_ ; emphasis on this, emphasis on our. He didn't sleep much that night for the feeling that his starving bones had somehow syphoned the life that once lit his father up like a firecracker. 

After that, he and his father drifted apart like the detritus of an abandoned frigate.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

There were few things on the Normandy as reliable as the emptiness of its life support control room. Every six hours, like clockwork, its maintenance crew would run a quick inspection, making sure that everything was operating within regulations, checking and double-checking the readouts to ensure that they were sure. When they came out they were coloured red by the room's dry heat and nobody went in after them; in part because of that same heat, and in part because there was nothing in there anymore anyway.

As such, Joker felt relatively certain that nobody would be there now, three hours into second shift and two hours until the next check-up. 

Relatively, but not entirely. 

Three tours of duty with Shepard taught him that the failure to account for her was often fatal to a plan. Thanks to EDI's inclination towards nosiness and her weak regard for privacy, he was also uncomfortably aware that Shepard was locked into the routine of her last tour. EDI had her clocked at eleven visits to life support, even though Thane hadn't been there in months; even though, now, he was dead. Five of those visits happened over the past two days, the vids Kolyat gave her clearly taking their toll. 

But there weren't many places better suited to a round of contemplation. His room, with its giant screen, sizeable collection of vids and games, and even larger porn stash, was nothing if not a dangerous temptation into distraction. The bridge held even more distractions, Dr Chakwas would mother hen him if he loitered anywhere near the medbay, there were too many stairs in engineering, and he never quite felt at place in the virility choked hangars. 

As far as worst case scenarios went, encountering Shepard was the least bothersome. 

Still, he wasn't actively expecting her to be there ahead of him, leaning against the far display case that once held Thane's gun collection and now contained dust and air and the reminder that the room was empty, just in case anybody forgot. 

He moved inside. She didn't move at all. 

“Hey, Commander.”

“I wasn't looking for company,” she said. There was a tired quality to her voice. Her delivery was uncharacteristically snappish, a tone he'd only heard once before, after Thessia. Even though she was less admonishing this time, he felt a pang of intrusiveness nevertheless. 

He didn't think to leave though. The list of people who'd asked him to keep Shepard from the precipice of succumbing to unthinkable strain was longer than he would have liked. Anderson had started it shortly after the Normandy took off from Vancouver. Garrus soon followed suit, then Liara, then Kaidan, then Tali, and finally, unexpectedly, Wrex. He wasn't sure where they were coming from, asking the man with the brittle bones; perhaps, he thought, it was as simple as them worrying about her so deeply that _keep an eye on Shepard_ replaced _goodbye_ in their vocabularies. Regardless, he took it to heart every time. 

“Neither was I,” he said. “But I hear misery loves it so I'm game if you are.”

Shepard pushed herself away from the wall, folded her arms across her chest, tilted her head, considering him. In doing so, she stepped a little further into the room's dim light and Joker could see beads of sweat nestling close to her hairline. He wondered how long she'd been there.

“I didn't know you were so fond of Thane,” she said, pressing her lips into a thin line. There was something confused about her. Disconnected. 

Joker frowned.

This wasn't Commander Shepard, it was Jane, who was operating on too few victories and not enough sleep and who, little by little, was losing the ability to see the world outside of herself as a result. 

“I'm not. Don't get me wrong, he was a great guy, but...” 

He hesitated to find the words. Shepard found them for him and said: “Shit, your family. Sorry, Joker.”

“It's fine. You've got a lot on your plate.”

“Yeah, but...” 

“Commander.”

Shepard heaved a heavy sigh and looked at him, apologetic. If she had a flaw, Joker thought, it was that she tended to wield her failures as devices of self-flagellation. It had grown especially prevalent as of late, reaching a point where it seemed that as soon as she'd been relieved of one, she lifted up another from the charred energy and shattered confidence pooled around her feet and began anew. 

“Okay,” he said, making good and damned sure to edge the frustration out of his tone. “I give! You're a horrible, inconsiderate person and I'm not sure how you live with yourself. Now, if we could move on from debating how deeply you've wounded me by having worse shit to worry about, that'd be great.”

Shepard smiled. “Touché.” 

Joker felt his shoulders relax. He stopped waiting to be asked into the room and shuffled towards the table where he sat down, briefly considering who might have left their mug there and why. Then he thought about the way his father liked his coffee – a heavy splash of milk, a squirt of a fruity asari syrup – and wondered if he had started cultivating orange trees yet, like he said he was going to the last time they talked. 

The room had almost fallen into a comfortable silence when Shepard spoke up again, saying: “You don't talk about your family much.” 

Joker shifted in his chair. Not uncomfortable, but unsure; he knew she was trying to reach out to him but he wasn't certain how far he wanted to reach back. “There are a lot of things I don't talk about,” he said. 

Shrugging her shoulders, Shepard leaned back against the display case. There was a level of casualness to her posture that hadn't existed there the first time; an air of relaxation that Joker could feel in his own tense, tired mind. “My parents were stationed on Arcturus for a few months in '62.” 

That one statement reasserted why Joker didn't mind her company. She was neither evasive nor domineering, managing to be just prying enough that he could bounce his thoughts off her words and her actions without having to brace himself against a rebound. 

“No shit?” he said. “Think we might have crossed paths?”

“Maybe. I was kind of a wallflower.”

“Hold on, you, a wallflower?”

“More of a _windowflower_. Still haven't come across a view of the fleet as good as the one on Arcturus.” 

Joker leaned back in the chair, careful not to upset its balance. “Yeah, no kidding. It's what made me want to become a pilot.”

“ _That's_ what made you enlist?” 

There was a teasing lilt to her voice. Joker made a clicking sound. It wasn't the most common reason, sure, and most soldiers – like Shepard, he knew – were drawn to the power of heroism, not of motion. But it was what it was and he was hardly ashamed. 

“Hey, I'm more than happy to leave most of the world-saving to people who can climb down a flight stairs without the _Jaws_ theme playing in the back of their minds.” 

“Most?”

“I've got to have a little fun every now and again too, Commander.” 

Shepard laughed. It was a good sound and though it wasn't anything like like Hilary's deep, boisterous bursts of laughter or his father's rolling chuckles, it bore the same relaxing familiarity. 

_Please_ , he thought, _if they didn't survive let them have died fighting. No husks. No waiting to be reduced to goo. Let them, at least, never have lost themselves_. 

He figured that Shepard read the shift in his mood because she didn't say anything else, just closed her eyes and returned to wherever her own thoughts had been. Joker watched her for a bit, waited for her to look back at him, but she didn't. In that moment, he dared to believe that she was comfortable. 

A knock on the door startled her back into the room. 

“You expecting someone?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“It's open,” Shepard called out, somewhat awkwardly. The door was always open. Nobody ever knocked.

Garrus walked in, nodded to Shepard, then to Joker, not surprised to see either of them. “EDI asked me to escort you somewhere else, Shepard.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder as if the exit needed identifying. “Said she wants to talk to Joker in private.” 

A cool voice followed, filtering into the room with the completeness of air: EDI's. “I thought we agreed on a ruse, Officer Vakarian,” she said. 

“No, you suggested one.”

“And you said it was a great idea.”

“That was sarcasm, EDI.”

Joker groaned. Shepard covered her mouth, trying to conceal a smile that EDI couldn't have seen anyway. Silence refilled the room for a few moments before EDI smoothed it over by saying: “Noted. My social receptors have been adjusted accordingly.”

Shepard offered Joker a final, supportive glance and said, “I'd take us there if I could, Joker.” 

He shrugged his shoulders and gave her a little smile. The gesture said _I know_ so he didn't have to put it to words. 

“All right Garrus,” she said, moving up beside him. “I'll give in without a fight.” 

The two of them turned towards the door. Garrus scraped Shepard's finger with the claw of his talon, gently, and she tilted her head towards him, just enough that her hair brushed against his neck. Joker looked away, not wanting to intrude any further into their privacy.

“The salarians have released some information on the survivors,” EDI continued as soon as the door swished shut behind them.

Joker waited for her to say more; when she didn't, he was hit with the understanding that the news wasn't good. EDI was efficient. Had his family been found safe and whole she would have started with _The salarians have confirmed the survival of Kevin and Hilary Moreau_ , or something to that effect. Still, he asked: “Does any of that information come in the form of names?”

“Yes. Hilary Moreau remains unaccounted for.”

“Damn,” Joker said, barely a whisper. He couldn't bring himself to ask about his father. EDI would tell him either way, he figured. Why rush the inevitable. 

“There is more. I thought the publicly available information was inadequate so I hacked into the sealed reports.”

“That's a joke, right?” 

“No. One of the survivors encountered your father during the escape. She is on record stating that he died in combat.”

A burning sensation settled behind his eyes and he channelled everything he had left to stop his lips from quivering. From the moment he first got word that Reapers landed on Tiptree, he had been working to solidify himself against an outcome where he lost his father, or his sister, or both, but no amount of mental strengthening was enough to preemptively ensure he maintained his composure. 

_Not a husk_ , he thought, repeatedly. _Not a husk, not a husk_ , thinking it again and again until it finally became a small consolation. Joker accepted it, so starving for goodness that he would take whatever crumbs were thrown his way. 

Not a husk. 

Not going to break down in life control. 

Not a husk.

He swallowed, centred his breathing, waited for EDI to continue. She didn't. 

“Uh, EDI?”

“I am giving you time to process the information, Jeff.”

Of course. Under normal circumstances he'd be charmed; under these ones, he had to choke down the acrid anxiety thickening in his throat.

“Forget that,” he said. “What about Hilary?” 

“Multiple reports state that she was last seen in the care of an asari Commando.” 

A beat. All sound faded beneath the heaviness of his pulse. Thrum, thrum, thrum, the flow of his blood, the sound of an army marching into battle, the beat of his heart as he was reunited with hope; the beat of Hilary's as she was reunited with him. 

“You're shitting me! A Commando?”

“Yes. They were assisting in the evacuation process.”

Later, he would look back on that moment and see a million flaws in the logic that drove him to feel relief. The odds of a single asari commando and a determined fifteen-year-old fighting against a Reaper invasion were depressingly grim. Hilary wasn't registered on the list of colonists rescued by the asari shuttle. Survivor stories were brutal, especially coming from the few people who were lucky enough to flee the carnage that befell the area surrounding the Moreau's farm. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

And with just a little extra prodding, an information trail would have led him to Huerta Memorial Hospital, where a traumatized asari told stories about a farm girl who wanted to fly, and who fought and survived and struggled to live until she became detrimental to a huntress' survival and had to be killed. 

But right there, right then, in that very moment, he clung to that optimism like it was the lone buoy keeping him afloat in oceanic depths of uncertainty. 

“Also,” EDI said after a while, “I have been looking through your old photos. There are a lot of you with your father.”

Joker was quiet for some time longer. His smile began to fade. He wished she'd left the conversation at _asari Commando_. Eventually, he fell back into the comforting embrace of self-depreciative sarcasm and said: “Someone had to hold me up while mom held the camera and said, _smile!_ ”

“I have reached a different conclusion, Jeff.”

“Can't wait to hear it,” he said. _Can't wait for you to get it over with_ was a touch more accurate, but a simple _Not now, EDI_ might have been more attuned to his mindset. 

“Perhaps he just enjoyed spending time with you.”

Joker sighed. 

As a child, he thought he saw pity and obligation in the way his father looked at him; as a flight student and, later, as a soldier, he learned that there was more distance to pity and more bitterness to obligation. By the time he righted things for himself mentally, it was too late to do much about it interpersonally. Now, it just sucked hearing others easily pick up on the honesty of his father's love, knowing that he'd wasted so much time believing otherwise. 

Amidst the continued silence, EDI spoke up again, saying: “I enjoy spending time with you.”

“Yeah, yeah, you're all right too,” he said, then added, “Shouldn't you be working though?”

“I am on a break. Would you like some privacy?”

“Please?”

“Understood. See you later, Jeff.”

“Yeah, later.”

It would be a while before he could bring himself to stand up again; not for the tremble that had settled in his knees, or for the thought that the crew might be able to read between the now tighter lines of his smile. The room was so warm, dry and humid, and he knew that as soon as he left, a chill would be waiting to overtake him. 

He was starting to understand why Shepard retreated there so often. 

So there, in the room's enveloping silence, he wondered how his father would have felt about EDI, if he'd have liked her, if he'd have found her odd, how well she would have fit into the simplicities of his life. He chose to believe that they would have gotten along beautifully well for no other reason than the brief feeling of happiness the thought brought him.

He couldn't wait to introduce her to Hilary.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

While the other children his age scrambled through metal halls, laughing, shouting, on their way to play on makeshift metal fields, Joker sat atop his father's shoulders. Together, they stared out the large window overseeing the docking bay and watched as all manner of ship – human and turian and asari and salarian and quarian and some, even, that Joker still wouldn't recognize today – came and went. Whether they had successes or failures behind them didn't matter to Joker; they held the glory of the galaxy regardless.

He learned to read by remembering which letters combined to form the names of his favourite ships, his father guiding him along as those letters became syllables that grew into words. As a reward for graduating to books and datapads, his father gave him his first model ship – a turian dreadnought with no real connection to the military. Not that it mattered. Not that Joker even realized. 

They built it together, piece by piece. Once it was done, his father mounted it on the ceiling above his bed, a way to protect him against bad dreams. 

They came anyway. They always do.


	3. - LOVER -

“Checkmate.”

“Are you shitting me? That took what, four moves?”

“I am not 'shitting' you, Jeff.”

“Damn. Damn! Damn. Can't we play, like, Battleship or, I don't know, something that doesn't bring out the diabolical strategist side of you?”

“I would be able to analyse your movements to determine where you placed the pieces.”

“Or you could try _not_ cheating. Just a thought.”

“I do not understand. Why shouldn't I make the best use of my abilities?” 

“Because it's more fun for the poor human you're playing against?”

“Fun is important?”

“It's kind of what games are built on.”

“I see.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes. Would you enjoy my company better if I were fun?”

“It wouldn't hurt.”

“Understood. I will endeavour to be more fun.”

* * *

It had taken nearly two hours to account for the entire crew. Another six hours – broken in half by the darkness of a night lit up by a scant starfield – were spent cataloguing the extensive damage to the Normandy; the hull breaches, the shorted currents, the systems that had suddenly and inexplicably shut down as though the impact of the crash had shattered their intangible code. Far less time was spent deliberating on who would serve as the interim commander. The election of Kaidan to that position was natural, logical. As the highest ranking Alliance official and the only Spectre on board, he simply attracted the most arguments in his favour. From his guidance came a unified purpose built from a solid understanding of what repairs to prioritize and who was assigned to each section of the broken ship.

But nothing he said bore the intent of restoring EDI. 

“How do you propose that we fix the Normandy _without the Normandy_?” Joker had asked, incredulous that the crew was on the verge of rewriting each individual system lost with EDI when she could fix them in a fraction of the time, and with far fewer errors. 

“We've tried bringing her back,” Tali had said. “But it's like something erased her code. We can't just rewrite it. And even if we could, she wouldn't be EDI. I'm so sorry, Joker.”

Most of the crew members who overheard them nodded in her support; others offered Joker sympathetic smiles, or they bowed their heads, or they refused to make eye contact, none of them sure how to empathize with losing an AI whose love was organic. 

Later, Kaidan stopped by Joker's quarters. “What do you want me to do?” he had asked. “With... EDI's mobile platform.” 

It was still in the bridge, strewn across the floor. Empty. Litter. 

“Whatever you want, man,” Joker had said. 

“I was hoping you had an opinion on...”

“I don't! Leave it there. Take it wherever. You're the boss, boss.”

When Joker returned to the bridge the next morning, EDI was gone and he was back to being the lone pilot of a ship without its core.

As he waited for the terminal to reboot he leaned back in his chair and sighed. 

“Just like old times,” he said to no-one.

* * *

Losing EDI had knotted more kinks into the system than Joker could conceptualize, and massaging them out was proving difficult. Not helping matters was the emptiness of the chair to his right, and the silence of the console to his left. More than once he'd turned to either side, wanting to ask if his calculations were off or if he was rewriting code using the right language, and hoping that she might break the monotony of work with a glimpse of her soul delivered in a parcel of wit. Pieces of her still existed within the expanse of code in front of him, and he'd managed to find small fragments of her mind during his repairs; bits of memories that skimmed the surface of who she was and what she could have been had she possessed a circulation system instead of circuitry. She was right beneath his fingers, like someone lost beneath an avalanche, still audible but not savable.

He wasn't sure whether or not he regretted that Kaidan had moved her unit to the cargo bay and laid her to rest in a spartan Alliance coffin. Either way, he found it absurd. Both for the almost patronizing application of human funeral traditions to a metal body and for how her death still felt impossible. Code can be immortal; EDI could have been immortal.

But she wasn't, and at times that thought brewed a bitterness that he could taste in the back of his throat.

Having her body there would have reminded him of the wrong priorities though, setting him down a course where he forgot that the crew and himself were lost in their own way and needed to be found first, no matter the consequence. So he allowed her to rest within the small pockets of data he stumbled on in his work, where she sat nestled between his conflicting need to both escape into the past and venture into a future unknown. 

Besides, he would always tell himself when he looked into the emptiness and grief constricted his mind, he was used to his sideways glances never being met. 

In his worst moments he would add to that: _Just not by EDI._

* * *

As the Normandy started to form an almost coherent whole, the crew grew inclined towards spending their time somewhere in the vicinity of Joker's shoulders, alternating between bothering him for status updates and engaging in vicarious productivity. With the comm systems back online, the hull whole, and 72% of the ship's power reliably restored, there weren't many other outlets for their need to do something, anything, to get the goddamned ship off the goddamned ground and back into the Sol system.

Garrus was an exception to that trend. Initially, he kept to reports on his own status and inquiries into whether or not there was anything he could do to help. After news had reached them of the war's end and Shepard's presumed death, he withdrew a little. Responded to questions without posing any himself, keeping busy instead on little things like required little thought, like minor maintenance and plumbing and gathering food to bolster their dwindling supply. 

When Joker heard the familiar beat of his boots against the bridge's metal floors, he knew something was up; not necessarily wrong, just different. 

“Got a minute, Joker?” 

“I might even have three if the price is right. What do you need, Garrus?”

“Could you turn around? I have something to give you.”

Joker obliged. Garrus was holding out a long, steel blue strip of metal with three white letters engraved into its face.

_E_

_D_

_I_

“It's a plaque for the memorial wall,” Garrus said. “I made one for … Shepard as well. Was thinking of gathering a few people together tonight to pay our respects.” He paused. His lips were parted just enough that Joker could read the intent for a follow-up written within the line they formed, so he enveloped his thoughts in the silence and waited. It couldn't have been longer than a few seconds, but Garrus' voice returned with the thickness of a lifetime-old sadness. “Yesterday was her public funeral. Today, the private one – friends and family. We're the only ones who haven't put her to rest.” 

Taking the plaque, Joker wondered if he was ready to commit EDI to death. It was warm in his hands and rough around the edges, almost enough to draw blood. It didn't feel like EDI, Joker thought. He wondered why he figured it might. Then he turned it over in his hands and tried to find a solution scratched into its back.

There was nothing there.

Garrus remained quiet. 

“She's still in the system,” Joker said, eventually. “Not completely, it's not like she's aware or anything, just … I mean, from where I'm sitting the code looks great, but …”

“You're thinking about deleting what's left of her.”

“Yeah.”

“It makes sense. The code can't properly execute if it's still receiving her signal. Even if that signal's abbreviated.” 

“Put yourself in my shoes for a sec, man. Do you think you could do it? Pull the trigger on the Commander?”

“I don't know. If she was suffering, maybe, but, well. You know.” 

“Yeah, I know.”

Neither man spoke for a while. They weren't looking at each other either – or rather, they weren't seeing each other because they were looking inside of themselves instead. One wanted to help; the other to hide. 

It was Garrus who conceded several minutes later. “I still want to do this for Shepard tonight. Will you be there?”

Joker turned away, put EDI's plaque beside his terminal. Face down. Still no answers on the back, but at least there wasn't any finality carved into that side of its surface. “I'll be there,” he said, and Garrus left. 

It took the better part of three hours for Joker to gather his resolve and isolate all of EDI's pieces into something that didn't compromise the code it once occupied. Another thirty minutes was spent second guessing himself, and guilting himself, and philosophizing on how theoretically easy it was to kill his lover. Just two clicks. Delete. Confirm. 

Finally, he deleted. He confirmed.

The system restarted and the Normandy resurrected beneath his hands.

* * *

“Is something wrong, Jeff?”

“Nah. Just getting in some rare thinking time before Shepard pisses off another half dozen Reapers.”

“Good. The thought of you being unhappy was making me uncomfortable. I would have wanted to help you but I am not sure that my empathy programs have developed enough for that level of interaction.”

“Hey, just thinking that way already puts about five steps ahead of most of humanity in the whole _being empathetic_ thing.”

“Are you just saying that to please me?”

“The fact that you even have to ask tells me that we need to introduce you to more humans. We're kind of jerks, EDI.”

“Understood. That will make this easier for me.”

“Uh, what exactly have I just made easier?”

“Being here for you.”


	4. - COMMANDER -

Typically, night time on the Normandy was Joker's favourite part of the day. He liked how everything fell quiet around him, leaving only the hum of machinery, the sound of EDI working beside him, and the gentle click-clack of fewer footsteps exercising greater courteousness against the metal flooring while the rest of the ship slept. That silence afforded him the opportunity to think, to focus, to soothe the Normandy's systems so they would be strong and smooth the next day. 

Tonight though, his silence was fractured by the loudness of Shepard's presence on the bridge. There was something off about her, he noticed. The way she held herself like a cardboard cut-out. Her sharpened eyes, her tightened lips, the firmness with which she held her hands at her sides and the tension he could almost see rippling through them in tight waves of stress. 

There was also the matter of her clothes. 

For all the time Joker had served under her command, he had never seen her dress in anything other than civvies and whatever crew uniform was standard at the time. It was how she kept herself humble, she'd told him once, but that wasn't quite the truth. Command suited her brilliance and her dedication and her immaculate empathy, but it was an ill match for her personality. Reverence got under her skin, and so she did her best to avoid anything that might place her above the rest of her crew. Like dress apart from them. 

But right there, right then, on the last leg of their trip back into the Sol system, she was decked out in full Alliance blues. 

She had never looked better; she had never looked worse; she had never looked less like herself, even when she stood before him rebuilt by Cerberus hands using Cerberus tech and he couldn't help but question how much of her they had left in tact, how much they had changed. 

“I need you to promise me something, Joker,” she said. 

“Sure thing.”

“None of us know what's going to happen tomorrow. With the catalyst, or with anything. But I want to make one thing clear, and I expect you to understand.”

“I'm all ears, Commander.”

“If Admiral Hackett gives you the order to retreat, do it. Even if I'm not on board and you know you can reach me, do it, Joker.” 

He felt his mind freeze, and then his body. There was no easy way to respond to her words, as alarmingly together as they were. Indifferent to their gravity, she spoke them with the kind of simplicity that one would normally find in requests to do the laundry, to take on a shift in the mess. Joker was disarmed. “I...” he said, and then he didn't say anything else. 

“I brought these people too far for anyone to risk them solely for my sake,” she continued, then gave Joker time to answer. When he didn't, she added, “Please,” in a needy sort of tone that he never wanted to hear from her again. 

So he said, “All right,” and he said, “I promise.” Shepard closed her eyes. Seemed to relax but really she drooped, the honesty of her wilting lost beneath the strength of her military conditioning. Joker knew he should have left the conversation there and returned to work so she could get back to whatever she was doing, too, but he couldn't, and he asked: “You're not planning on surviving this, are you?”

“This is the last stretch; whether I live or die isn't important anymore.” She paused. Breathed. Then added, “And if I start believing I'm going to survive then I'll fight to live and I don't know that the galaxy can survive that kind of selfishness right now.”

“All right,” he said, though he wished he could voice the opposite. “If Hackett gives the order, I'll follow it.”

* * *

The Normandy and its crew had been back in the Sol system for nearly a week when search and rescue found Shepard floating just outside of Mars, far enough away from it that she wasn't drawn into its orbit but close enough that she was hard to find amongst the debris that had the planet surrounded. 

News stations across the galaxy devolved into vultures overnight, feeding on the recovery of Shepard's body until they were plump with misinformation. Feigning horror, they took to interviewing anyone with a kind of/sort of well thought out theory into what had happened. Something must have shifted when the Crucible was detached and Shepard fell through a human-sized crack. Or the search and rescue teams inadvertently spaced her body along with thousands of others because so many of them cluttered the Citadel that they'd become no better than garbage. Or it was all a conspiracy and Shepard had never even been near the Citadel, so the military had to come up with the _floating in space_ story to account for why first response teams weren't able to find her body. Bullshit like that. 

In actuality, a large piece of a Reaper had collided with the Crucible, crumbling enough of it away that Shepard was denied the comfort and security of gravity. That was the story Joker first heard in the calming gruffness of Hackett's voice, and that was what he repeated to himself each time a new fool stepped beneath a microphone and used their imagination to capitalize on a very real death. 

Because she had already succumbed to the wounds that shredded her beauty and her strength into something monstrous and drained her of blood until she was pale and gray, he also knew that she didn't die struggling to live. Whether or not that was a consolation, however, Joker couldn't be certain.

Wouldn't ever be certain.

* * *

Beers with the original crew became beer with Kaidan when the shuttle carrying the others was waylaid by mechanical issues that couldn't be resolved because resources had been diverted elsewhere. An hour into what was supposed to be the fifth event in a long series of sending Shepard off right, with love and camaraderie and the determination to live in the world that she chose for them, they had barely paid any attention to their warming drinks, never mind to each other. 

Grief and quiet weren't solely responsible for choking the conversation out of them; there existed a certain awkwardness in the air, an aura of resentment, each man figuring the other for a traitor, neither man sure how to restitch the lines that had frayed between them, first when Shepard died, later when Joker defected to Cerberus and Kaidan sharpened his confusion into the kind of doubt that hurt in ways Shepard tried to hide but couldn't, not always. 

“So,” said Joker.

“So,” said Kaidan.

And so it went for a while longer, until they both began to realize how thoroughly they were defeating the purpose of pulling themselves from their funks and nursing a few beers with their buddies. Then Joker said, “Hey, did she ever tell you about the time she tricked some maintenance guy or whatever into thinking there was a bomb nearby?”

Kaidan frowned and slipped the tip of his tongue between his lips as if testing the mood in the air around him. “She did not,” he said, his words slowed by caution. 

“Okay, so get this. She's on some mission where she's gotta walk the upper parts of the Citadel – you know, the catwalks and the maintenance routes.”

“Right.”

“She gets to one of the rooms and there's a guy there who's about to be all _you shall not pass_ , but before he can even get a word in Shepard starts going on about how the whole place is about to go boom.”

“And he actually bought it?”

“Sure did.”

“Huh. I guess some people are just that gullible.”

“You've gotta give him more credit than that, man. If an N7 Spectre walks up to you in full armour saying there's a bomb about to blow you into itty bitty pieces, you listen.” 

“Yeah, I suppose.”

The silence returned. Joker tried to fill it with more of Shepard's noise, but instead his mind kept wandering to how good it felt to learn that she hadn't died over Alchera, and to how much he wished that someone would come up from behind him, tap him on the shoulder, tell him that the Normandy and its commander were once again in need of their pilot. 

Eventually, Kaidan figured out it was his turn to speak and so he said, “What about the time she tried to climb over a 1000 metre mountain in the Mako? Did she ever tell you that one?”

“What? No. No way. She did not do that. She didn't! Did she?”

“She did. The beacon was only about a few dozens metres in front of where we landed. It would have taken us at least twice as long to take the proper route.” Kaidan stopped there, reached for his beer. Took a sip. Frowned. “Warm,” he said, then lifted his hand to call over a waiter, a small, anxious looking man who couldn't have been older than eighteen, nineteen. 

“What can I get for you?” he asked.

“Another two beers, please.”

“Right away.”

Kaidan turned back to Joker. “Anyway, she just looks back at us and says, ' _I'm going to need you guys to hold tight for a while,_ ' doesn't even tell us why, if you can believe it.”

“Wait, hold on, who was the third?”

“Garrus.”

Joker laughed, short and sharp and genuine. “Gotta wonder if that explains why he was always poking at the thing.” 

“Yeah, I guess so,” Kaidan said, letting out his own breath of a laugh. “So Garrus and I just look at each other and I must have seemed terrified because he mouthed ' _it'll be fine, just don't ask_.' Which he followed by gripping onto the supports real hard.”

“And that's when he looked terrified to you, right?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Shepard gives us about ten, twenty seconds _maybe_ to secure ourselves, and then she accelerates the Mako to full speed and just hits the mountain flying.”

“Did it work though?”

“Not only did it work, but get this; after twenty minutes of one of the worst rides I've ever experienced, Shepard walks out of the thing like it was nothing. Meanwhile, Garrus and I are still trying to figure out how to get our arms to stop shaking and our legs to start working again.” 

“Oh man, I can't believe she didn't tell me any of this. I mean the entire story has _Joker_ written all over it.”

“Maybe she didn't want to give you any ideas.”

“Come on, there aren't any mountains in space!”

“No, but there are more than a few theoretically impassable asteroid belts out there that I'm sure a guy like you would love to try to navigate at full speed.”

Joker started to say, “Huh, maybe I should...” but trailed off. Maybe he should what? Sit at a desk and theorize about how well the Normandy would fare in an environment differently hazardous to the galactic core he barely managed to navigate en route to the Collector base? Hijack a ship and test fate? Pretend that a lifetime of adventure awaited him, just for shits and giggles in a shitty bar? 

To his credit, Kaidan allowed the silence to wash over the conversation, to carry it out to the sea and to the stars where maybe it would at least reach Shepard's memory, even if it had failed to infuse them with the warmth they sought. And to the credit of the waiter, he came by, dropped off their drinks, and didn't say a word. 

Those drinks were wasted, too.

* * *

“Why don't you get some sleep, Joker?” she said. Her hand rested on the back of his chair in a way that found the tips of her fingers lingering against the black nylon of his uniform. “We've got a big day ahead of us and I need you at your best.” 

“With all due respect Commander, you need the sleep more than I do.”

Shepard tried to laugh. Mostly failed. “Hey, all I need is adrenaline.”

“Commander.”

“I could always make it an order, Joker,” she said, and he could tell that she wasn't entirely kidding. 

“Fine, fine,” he said. “I'll go, but you've got to get some rest too.”

Shepard moved aside, clearing his way. “I guess that sounds fair.”

With a groan that stretched up from his tired bones and sapped what little energy reserves he had remaining, Joker pulled himself from his seat and stumbled towards Shepard, stopping in front of her. “We're gonna come out of this okay. Even you, Commander.”

She smiled the kind of smile that said she didn't believe him, not because there was inherent dishonesty or a lack of likeliness in his statement, but because she somehow knew otherwise. He placed his hand on her shoulder as he passed her by and she didn't move, not even to flinch it away. 

Joker waited around the corner for the better part of an hour before accepting that Shepard had no intention of returning to her quarters that night, no desire to sleep, no more energy left to build an argument from honesty instead of lies. 

Leaving the CIC and Shepard behind him, he hoped to heaven and to hell and to the entire goddamned galaxy that she was wrong about what fate awaited her.


	5. - SISTER -

Each day, pieces of Joker wafted away from Hilary's outstretched hands. The wholes of his voice and the halves of his smile. The slow shuffle of his feet, once across metal, now across linoleum and real hardwood. The way that his hugs were so full and loving that one would never expect that a sudden twist would shatter his bones. All the small things that made him who he was now forged a precarious existence on the edge between the real and the imagined; between the man who appeared in her thoughts and the one who shared her blood, along with a small part of her history. 

More than a month ago, he had fallen off the grid. The Alliance contacted her father spouting suspicions that he had defected to Cerberus, and they advised him on the consequences of conspiracy should he feel compelled to support his son regardless of any actions he might take. After that, Hilary spent no small amount tracking Joker down, first by attempting to remotely hack his omni-tool, then by trying to uncover any bits of him caught in the extranet's web, and finally by leaving her own trail in hope that he would at least realize how much she missed him. 

She was close to scaling back her efforts when she received a call listed by a name she hadn't expected to see again: _Normandy_. It flashed orange on her screen, and each time it faded out she thought to herself, _no, it's going to stay dark and then I'll know I'm imagining things_ , but it kept coming back until she answered. 

“Jeez, it's about time,” came Joker's voice, and Hilary was sad to discover that her memory of it wasn't as close as she'd thought. “If I didn't know any better, I'd think I did something to piss you off, but nah, you love me too much for that to be true.”

“The Alliance was in contact with dad,” she said. The grin on Joker's face faltered into something less real, something more awkward, and Hilary had to swallow back the acridness creeping up from her stomach. It wasn't a new sensation, or even a very unfamiliar one; it was fear. The fear of losing her brother, the fear of never making him proud for reasons that didn't take root in the superficiality of their genes, the fear of him not calling her anymore because he took her loneliness as lovelessness. 

“Still with the awkward questions first, huh?”

“Well, technically it wasn't a question.”

“Oh good, then I don't have to answer it.”

“It was a lead-in to the question. Are you in trouble?”

Joker shrugged in a way that angled his left arm forward. There beneath the curve of his shoulder, the Cerberus insignia cut ominous gold into the neutrality of black and Hilary felt a rush of distaste swell in her blood. “Always, squirt,” he said. “But the commander's pretty solid. Definitely someone you can trust to add a bit of the shine back to my reputation.”

“Who is it?”

“That much is classified. But I should be able to tell you that she's a friend without getting horribly lynched by Cerberus' top brass.”

“So ... are you there for her?”

“Yeah. I am. Though I'm not gonna lie here – the ship's a nice bonus.”

“Well, it's the Normandy.”

“It's the Normandy with about a billion credits worth of improvements.”

“Nice,” she said, though she knew enough about Cerberus not to mean it. 

From that point on, the conversation softened into more common topics. Friends, family, work, school. Because Hilary had begun preliminary pilot instruction at the Tiptree port, she also had a long list of questions she wanted to ask him about Alliance schools and Alliance ships and Alliance military protocols, but he would just touch his nose each time. Their signal. It meant he couldn't tell her then, but he would later, when he wasn't living beneath the eye of Cerberus. 

When she grudgingly let him return to duty, it was with the with the warmth of his promise of a later that never did come.

* * *

There was a very long list of things that the Alliance wanted Joker to do upon his return to civilization, most of which involved joining the PR war in the battle against shitty morale. Shake hands, deliver speeches, conduct interviews. Oh, and fit in treatment for malnourishment and PTSD somewhere inside the process of proselytizing for the Alliance. Health of the collective was more important than health of the individual, though nobody would say that. Not outright, anyway. 

Because Joker had a shorter list of his own, and because the same factors that made him such a prime public figure also afforded him the opportunity to say _no_ when others would have had to straighten their backs and say, _yes sir,_ he was permitted to sidestep most of that. At least temporarily and in exchange for the promise that he would let the universe inundate him with questions later. 

Beyond the grant of time, the Alliance was of no help. All their efforts had been centred around places where they were assured that human life still lingered amongst the wreckage, and Tiptree was dead. The asari military wasn't of much assistance either; not a single one of its many parts could tell Joker which ship had landed near his sister, or where its crew had gone.

Ultimately, it was the salarians who were able to provide him the information he sought in the form of the name _Aeian T'goni_ , which belonged to a huntress who'd boarded their rescue vessel. From there, Joker just had to pull a few strings to unveil her location as Huerta Memorial. 

“She's … really not fit for conversation,” her doctor said, apology clear in the way her fingertips danced upon each other. “Least of all on the topic of Tiptree.”

But Joker was tired and he was restless and he had come too far to be told _no_ , so he said, “Look, please, my little sister lived on Tiptree. She was fifteen. Someone said she was seen with an asari commando or a huntress or – I don't know how your ranks work, but Aeian's the only lead I've got here. So if I can't talk to her then can you just ask her or something? Anything?”

“Your sister. Was her name – “

“– Hilary. Her name's Hilary.”

The doctor nodded until too much time passed in silence, and then she nodded for a little while longer. A large part of Joker wanted to reach out and strangle a favourable response from her, but _something, something, patience is a virtue_ so he waited. 

“I shouldn't, but – I can tell you what might be the status of your sister,” she finally said, and Joker found himself feeling worse. Good news didn't deal in negatives like _shouldn't_. It wasn't delayed and then hinged on a _might_. His mind stumbled over the doctor's words with a directionless clumsiness that toppled him backwards into what she'd said earlier. 

_Was her name –_

_Was,_ past tense, followed by so much quiet, followed by more things equally absent comfort.

Followed by these words, dropped from Joker's tongue like hot lead: “She's dead, isn't she?” 

“If your sister is one and the same as the girl I'm thinking of, then yes.”

More silence.

“How are you?” she asked. 

“I want to know what happened.”

“That's –“

“Look,” Joker snapped beneath the tension of having to strain towards a closeness to closure, of knowing that the time he'd spent with Hilary wasn't enough and would never be enough, of feeling like a terrible brother who'd squandered the love of his little sister. “This is the one chance I've been given to find her before I get wrapped up in red tape and slapped up on some billboard somewhere. Are you seriously telling me you're not going to help?”

“I have,” she said. Ever the psychiatrist, unfazed by his outburst. “Helped. Now please, don't make me regret giving you the information I did.”

It was Joker's turn to stand there and stare in silence, in rage, in disbelief, and while it was supposed to be the doctor's turn to wait while he channelled hope's decay into something productive, she turned away instead and headed back into her office. 

Blood rushed to his head in heavy pulses. 

His world shifted off its orbit, his stomach churned, his bones threatened to crumble to dust. 

He heard the lock click behind her. 

Then he heard footsteps approach behind him. 

And finally, a voice said, “Give me a gun and I'll tell you what you want to know.”

Joker looked over his shoulder to see another asari standing there with dead eyes and nerves shocked so alive with trauma that her entire body trembled as though she were caught in the final throes of illness. 

“And who are you?” he asked. 

She held out her identification chip. 

Aeian T'goni. 

“I overheard your conversation,” she said, her words stilted by carefulness. “I was on my way to speak with the doctor but I could talk to you, too, if you would like.”

Slowly, Joker turned to face her. There was something almost pleading about her, and he pretended it meant her closure was intrinsically linked with his own. From there he decided there was no folly in taking her up on her offer of answers, even if deep down he knew the doctor was right. The person before him wasn't fit to talk about Tiptree. 

“Just …” he said, but he was too needy himself to fully articulate his thoughts, so he had to pause to collect the right words with which to craft the right question. “Do you know where she is now?”

“Yes. By the farms near where we met.”

“And that's close to her home, right?”

“Yes. She was kind to me, I remember. She allowed me to take a shower – it had been so long.”

“That isn't enough to go on. What else've you got?”

Aeian shook her head. “I tried to keep her safe,” she said. “Wherever she is, there will be a blast in the barn's wall; I found a place within for us to hide.”

Here, Joker's thoughts wandered to how scared Hilary might have been, how desperate, how uncertain. But how hopeful too, and how strong, and how determined. It was one thing to die quickly; it was something else entirely to die struggling to live. Those thoughts he thought so much that he left himself with inadequate room to form a response. 

Aeian, whose fractured mind still guided her down the path of the conversation she sought, suffered no such wordlessness. She positioned herself fully in front of him and said, “Will you give me a gun now, or do you need to know more?”

The thoughts stopped, and no new ones clarified themselves to Joker. Just words, these ones: “How did it happen?”, which came accompanied by regret sharp enough to shred his heart. 

He knew before she answered. 

He knew he didn't want to know. 

“I killed her,” she said, her delivery numbed. “Because she was whimpering. They could have heard. Neaira could have heard. Oh. Oh no. My eyes – what colour are they? I … they must be going black soon … Why else? Are they black yet?” 

Joker's chest hurt. His head was thick with airlessness and lifelessness and sisterlessness, and it took him a while to realize he had stopped breathing. He exhaled away some of the force compressing on his ability to exist and tried to remember that it was Hilary who had died. Hilary who had been killed at the hands of her protector. Hilary and only Hilary and not him, so he needed to breathe. For Hilary. Hilary, Hilary, Hilary. 

Oh how deeply, how desperately, he missed her. 

“No,” he said, trying to squelch the tears behind his voice. “They're not black.” Then he turned and made to leave the hospital. Aeian didn't say anything else, didn't try to follow him. “They're never gonna be black.”

And for a moment that lingered even after he was off the Citadel and back en route to Arcturus, he wished he had a gun to give her.

* * *

The Alliance wasn't alone in its neglect of the dead. All across the galaxy, whether human or asari, krogan or turian, salarian or drell, anyone who wanted to bring the shells of their loved ones home had to pool together their own resources. Often, they were further weighed down by a deluge of criticism from civilians who believed such actions were too self-serving to be appropriate. _After all_ , they argued, _those resources could have gone towards reconstruction efforts instead of some boondocks graveyard colony_. 

Like Tiptree.

Joker didn't give a damn. Through objections both passive and direct he pieced together a six person recovery crew, mostly comprised of young mercenaries. None of them could fathom the sight of thousands of human corpses and thousands more husks littering the ground atop blankets of blood, or talk about how it felt to exist inside the kind of deathly silence that magnified all their other senses, but they had great strength, were loyal to the dollar, and actually seemed to give a damn about the Reaper War's forgotten victims, so Joker commissioned them without many second thoughts. 

True opposition entered the equation late in the process, and it took the form of blue steel; hard and solid and unbending beneath the intensity of Joker's will. “You're needed here on Arcturus,” Hackett had said. “Refuse your station and I'll be left with no choice but to charge you with dereliction of duty.” Those orders weren't without concession on the Alliance's part though, as Hackett had already prepared another man to take over Joker's command of the mission: Lieutenant Jasper Marx, a former resident of Tiptree who'd been working on the mass relay reconstruction project despite his relative inexperience with the technology.

While Joker fielded interviews like a good little war hero, his haphazard crew began the unpleasant task of cataloguing Tiptree's dead and preparing bodies to be returned to their families. If their families were still alive. If not, the bodies would remain on Tiptree where they'd be buried in a memorial cemetery somewhere close enough to never be forgotten, but far enough away so as not to strike a fatal blow against the morale of resettling a massacred colony. But that would be done by another team at another time in the indistinguishable future. 

News soon came in the form of: “ _Flight Lieutenant Moreau, this is Lieutenant Marx requesting access to your DNA for the purpose of comparative analysis._ ” Which could only mean that they'd found the dead girl resting at the end of madness' trail. Joker obliged without first wondering into any consequences of releasing that information over the less secure postwar extranet; he lacked the time, and the patience, and any belief in the value of the organic code that glitched his bones into a state of near uselessness to care. 

The results weren't quite as quick to follow. Whatever networks his team had to go through to access the data, then download it, then send it off for proper comparison, then download the percentage that would tell them _probably_ or _probably not_ , were still slowed by the combined force of the congestion of heightened traffic and the reassignment of resources normally meant to contend with that congestion. 

In the time spent waiting, Hackett had moved behind him with the quietness of stealth, a lone whisper amidst the loud voices acknowledging barked commands. Joker knew he was there, could see his reflection in the gloss of his desk, could feel his radiant authority warm the air, but he didn't acknowledge his presence beyond an involuntary tensing of his shoulders. When finally Lieutenant Marx reestablished communications, he offered Joker a curt nod and gave his focus to Hackett, which Joker found he didn't mind so much. The burden of responding to “We have a 99.972% confirmation that the remains we found belong to Hilary Moreau” went to Hackett, who delivered a simple “Thank you, Lieutenant, you're doing good work, please continue” before reaching over Joker to end the call. 

It was all much cleaner than he expected. Almost as though his sudden detachment from command of the mission had bleached away the toxins of finality and left him with a mentality that was fresh and empty and a little overly sanitary. But still nice for all its numbness. 

Or, nice until Hackett said, “This is an order, Flight Lieutenant: take the rest of the day off.” Then everything became muddied again. In dutifulness existed escape, and Joker had planned to remain where his work was, where his focus was, and where his sister wasn't; where his thoughts wouldn't wander, where his mind wouldn't dream up scenario after scenario starring him as a brother who had been there for his sister throughout more than a few small measures of time. 

Hackett said nothing more, just watched with solidity as he powered down his terminal, fumbled around for his crutches, and departed. 

There was nowhere else for Joker to go but his small apartment. Just around the corner from central command and several kilometres away from his childhood home, it was convenient twice over. But not home. Not anything like home. 

He had no family with whom he was close enough to call; no friends about whom he could say any better. Though he thought to contact Liara, he concluded that she had enough shit to wade through on Thessia without adding his sister to the sludge. And nobody else from the Normandy knew about his family. Reaching out to them bore the inevitability of too many questions asked balanced by minimal consolation given. 

So this is what he did:

He sat in the silence of his room. He hooked up his flight simulator. And he flew a toned-down Normandy across the galaxy until it was tomorrow and his instinct to mourn was replaced by his obligation to serve.


End file.
